RALEIGH, N.C. — Critics of North Carolina’s statewide eCourts system filed an amended complaint Wednesday in U.S. District Court that still names vendor Tyler Technologies and Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, three weeks after a docket entry said plaintiffs had settled with Tyler.
Ten plaintiffs filed the amended complaint. They allege the paper-to-digital court rollout has left hundreds of people unlawfully detained, with some spending days or weeks longer than necessary in jail and others arrested multiple times on the same warrant after charges were dismissed. The filing seeks to represent people across North Carolina subjected to wrongful arrest or overdetention lasting as little as two hours because of eCourts errors.
A Sept. 16 PACER entry said Case Reported Settled as to Tyler Technologies, with a settlement agreement was due Oct. 16 and no public terms. The amended complaint contradicts that entry by keeping Tyler as a defendant alongside McFadden. Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather also filed Wednesday seeking to quash a subpoena he called overly broad and burdensome.
U.S. District Judge William Osteen ruled in March 2025 that negligence claims could proceed against Tyler and that three plaintiffs had plausibly alleged McFadden breached a duty when they were overdetained, while dropping Wake County Sheriff Willie Rowe on statutory immunity in the case titled Chaplin v. Rowe. Thirteen named plaintiffs pursued the original potential class action before the amended filing trimmed the caption.
Plaintiffs argue similar Tyler software rollouts elsewhere produced well-documented overdetention and wrongful arrests, and that officials forged ahead without failsafes even after problems surfaced. Defenders of the system have said eCourts replaced error-prone paper filing after years of planning across judicial administrations. The dispute remains one of the highest-profile challenges to North Carolina’s digital court conversion.
